Hero #104: John Pilger … (02/19/16)
John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist (now based in the United Kingdom, where he won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award in both 1967 and 1978) and documentary film maker who has long been a strong critic American, Australian and British foreign policies; all of which he (quite correctly) considers to be driven primarily by an oligarchic imperialist agenda. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over fifty documentaries since.
In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues (documentary film-maker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper) entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. They made photographs and reports that became world exclusives. They also produced a documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which brought to people’s living rooms the suffering of the Cambodian people. During the filming of Cambodia Year One, the team were warned that Pilger was on a Khmer Rouge ‘death list.’ Indeed, in one incident shortly thereafter, they narrowly escaped death by ambush … Following the showing of Year Zero, some $45 million was raised, unsolicited — in mostly small donations, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. These monies funded the first substantial relief effort to Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving medical supplies, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear.
Pilger has also long criticized aspects of Australian government policy, particularly what he (again correctly) regards as the systemic racism it inflicts upon the country’s indigenous population, and also travelled to East Timor and clandestinely shot a documentary focusing on the brutal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975. The film, entitled Death of a Nation, significantly contributed to an international outcry which ultimately led to Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor, and that country’s eventual independence in 2000.
But Pilger’s influence didn’t stop there. The broadcast of his scathing anti-occupation documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002) resulted in complaints by the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Conservative Friends of Israel that it was inaccurate and biased. The UK television regulator (the Independent Television Commission), however, ordered an investigation and ultimately rejected those complaints.
The documentary The War on Democracy (2007) was Pilger’s first film to be released in the cinema. According to Andrew Billen of The Times, it proved to be “an unremitting assault on American foreign policy since 1945.” The film boldly explores the role of U.S. interventions, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in Central and South America; interventions which placed “a succession of favorably disposed bullies in control of America’s Latino backyard.” Among other things, it exposes the U.S. role in the 1973 overthrow of democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile, a leader who was then replaced by one of the most vile dictators the world has ever seen — Augusto Pinochet.
During the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, Pilger courageously (and again, correctly) criticized Obama, accurately predicting both that he was but “a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan” and that his primary theme “was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully.” After Obama was elected and took office in 2009, Pilger avoided pandering to the new leader’s popularity, and was one of the few with the temerity to call it like it was; stating that, “In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded a far more secret government.”
Pilger also openly supported Julian Assange (the founder of WikiLeaks) by pledging bail for him after Assange was wrongfully accused by the Swedish government (many believe at the behest of the United States), and then featuring the Wikileaks editor-in-chief in his documentary entitled The War You Don’t See (2010).
“The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food … We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening and wretched … Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but rather that peace is only possible with justice, and with the information that gives us the power to act justly.” ~ John Pilger
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